During the Democratic presidential debate tonight, Sen. Bernie Sanders said the unemployment rates among black youths is at 51 percent and that Hispanic youth unemployment is at 36 percent.
These figures are totally off. The real unemployment figures, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, put unemployment rates at 20.7 percent among black youths and 12.7 among Hispanic youths.
Sanders is getting his numbers from the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank with a tendency to do math rather creatively. These inflated unemployment rates only look at minority youths who are not college educated. They also count those who were working part-time as unemployed to arrive at that higher figure.
While Sander’s estimate of unemployment rates is hyper-inflated, to say the least, black unemployment rates are still staggeringly higher than overall youth unemployment rate of 12.7 percent. Sanders does have a point that black youths are having a harder time finding work, but to say that half are unemployed is pure fiction.
